China, Autonomous Orthodox Church of

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

The presence of Christianity in China dates back to Antiquity. It is mentioned in church traditions that the Apostle Thomas preached the gospel there in the first cen­tury. Concrete historical evidence shows that it was a lively missionary field of the Byzantine-era patriarchate of Antioch. Artifacts from this ancient missionary enterprise along the Silk Road (once part of a wider Antiochene outreach to Ethiopia, India, and Persia) can now only be found rarely, such as the surviving stele of Xian, set up by Nestorian missionaries in 635 to mark their work in China. The Tang dynasty enacted repressive measures against foreign religions in 845, and the Christian Chinese missions must have suffered extensively then. The records that would have clarified how expansive this Eastern Christian mission was were extensively burned in a much later period (even by Renaissance western missionaries) – a profound loss to the history of Christianity in China.

The modern history of the Orthodox in China begins again with the Russians. In 1685 the Qing emperor resettled in the cap­ital a group of some thirty or so cossacks who entered his service after his capture of several Siberian border towns along the Amur river. Among the group of hostages was the priest Maxim Leontiev, who subse­quently served at the first Orthodox church in Beijing, gifted to the Orthodox commu­nity who elected to stay in China after the armistice by the Kangxi emperor. He gave over a Guandi temple (the Chinese god of war) which was reconsecrated as the Hagia Sophia Church with the blessing of the metropolitan of Tobolsk, and later refounded as Holy Dormition. The Chinese emperor recognized Fr. Leontiev by awarding him the title of “imperial official of the seventh rank.”

In 1715, after Fr. Leontiev’s death, the Russian Archimandrite Hilarion (Lezhaisky) was sent as replacement priest, together with a deacon and other church staff, as part of an agreement reached between Tsar Peter the Great and the Chinese emperor, thus establishing a formal Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing, which appears in official records after 1727. Its main purpose was to provide religious services to Russian diplomatic staff in the Chinese cap­ital. An estimate of the mid-19th century suggested there were still only about 200 Orthodox faithful in Beijing, most of whom were career diplomats or ethnic Russian descendants. The latter part of the 19th cen­tury witnessed a notable revival, following on the cultural work of the priest Hyacinth Bichurin and the monk Archimandrite Palladios, who both became masters of the Chinese language and initiated many trans­lations of Orthodox literature, as well as a sensitive outreach to the indigenous population.

The Boxer rebellion of 1898–1900, where Christian converts became a specific target for violence, saw 222 Orthodox Christians martyred for their faith. The library of the Beijing Orthodox mission was burned to the ground. Nevertheless by 1902 there were an estimated 32 Orthodox parishes in China with a total of between 5,000 and 6,000 faithful. By 1949 this had risen to about 106 Orthodox parishes in China. There was also a seminary and several Chinese parish priests. The 1917 Russian Revolution increased the missionary activ­ity in so far as many fleeing the political turmoil came east by way of Siberia, but the fall of the tsar also meant the church’s official source of funding dried up. After the revolution the Orthodox bishops in China came under the ecclesiastical juris­diction of the Karlovci Synod of Russian Bishops Outside Russia, but the Moscow patriarchate resumed effective jurisdiction in China after an agreement reached with both state powers in the late 1940s. By 1939 there were estimated to be as many as 200,000 Orthodox in China, with five bishops and an Orthodox college oper­ating at Harbin. By the end of the 1930s dioceses had been established in Shanghai and Tianjin, as well as in Harbin and Beijing.

Most of the clergy and people were then still ethnic Russians. The advent of repressive communist masters to China after the fall of Chang Kai Shek in the civil war altered this situation of slow growth. The communist government ordered the repatriation of all “foreign” missionaries working in China. Many of the ethnic Russian clergy were sent back at that time to the USSR, though others fled to America and Australia. With the increasing exit of the Russian community the numbers of Orthodox in China dropped precipitately. The later Cultural Revolution would also savagely crush all visibly surviving forms of the Chinese Orthodox Church. In 1956 Archbishop Viktor, the last serving Russian hierarch in China, returned to Russia following an agreement reached between Khruschev and Mao Tse-tung, and the next year the Chinese Orthodox Church was granted autonomous status by the Moscow patriarchate. This occurred despite its tiny size and its struggling condition, because of the political necessity of having verifiable independence from all “foreign powers.” Today, Orthodoxy is not among the official forms of Christianity acknowledged and legally sanctioned by the Chinese Com­munist State, but, even so, a small body of the Orthodox continues bravely. There are Orthodox parishes in Beijing and North­eastern China, as well as parishes operating in Shanghai, Guangdong province, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The Russian Orthodox church of Sts. Peter and Paul recently resumed services in Hong Kong, and the ecumenical patriarchate has sent a bishop there. The Orthodox mission church in Taiwan has operated freely for many decades. The Chinese Orthodox have had an immensely difficult time, laboring under a heavy yoke that still has not lifted. Their story is not yet over, per­haps has hardly begun, but their signifi­cance as being the originating form of

Eastern Christianity in the Far East merits more than a passing consideration when one considers the immense problems facing the church if it can come into freedom and leave behind its colonial legacy of a recent mission history heavily marked by intra ­Christian strife.

SEE ALSO: Russia, Patriarchal Orthodox Church of

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Baker, K. (2006) A History of the Orthodox Church in China, Korea, and Japan. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Barrett, D., Kurian, G., and Johnson, T. (2001) World Christian Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, P. (2008) The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia: And How it Died. New York: HarperOne.